I think we can dream strong.
In their last series, there were more than a few arcs where the girls did their thing without the MMC.
And I think we are reaching a point where just going from conflict to conflict and the next pair of booba (as great as it is) will get stale.
I think that there is an easy way to see if this will become a "damsel in distress" arc... if during the effort of investigating Sakura and Nia meet something too "fighty" for them to deal with, we can be sure that it will be a "damsel" situation, but if things show to be more subtle, we may have a true Sakura centric arc.
It will take some time, but let's wait and see.
